Ex-Serb chief balks at entering pleas

Saturday

Aug 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMAug 30, 2008 at 12:27 PM

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic made a defiant stand before a U.N. court preparing to try him on genocide charges, refusing to enter pleas yesterday and branding the tribunal a NATO proxy out to "liquidate" him.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic made a defiant stand before a U.N. court preparing to try him on genocide charges, refusing to enter pleas yesterday and branding the tribunal a NATO proxy out to "liquidate" him.

Judge Iain Bonomy entered not-guilty pleas on Karadzic's behalf on 11 counts, which also include charges of crimes against humanity. The move allows pretrial proceedings to proceed even though Karadzic rejects the court's legitimacy.

Karadzic is charged with genocide for allegedly masterminding atrocities, including the slaughter of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995 and the deadly siege of Sarajevo, when he was president of the breakaway Bosnian Serb republic.

He blended measured belligerence with sarcasm at his second appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, declining to respond to an indictment that accused him of orchestrating Serb atrocities throughout Bosnia's 1992-95 war.

"This court is representing itself falsely as a court of the international community, whereas it is in fact a court of NATO whose aim is to liquidate me," Karadzic said. "I will not plead."

Bosnian Serbs count NATO as an enemy after the alliance launched a bombing campaign in August 1995, ultimately forcing the Serbs to negotiate an end to the war with the Dayton peace agreement.

Karadzic is accused of masterminding the worst atrocities perpetrated by Serb forces in the Bosnian war, which claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people, and of orchestrating the savage ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats to clear the way for a Bosnian Serb ministate.

Survivors of the Bosnian war crowded into the court's public seating gallery to glimpse the man they say ruined their lives.

"I had the feeling I was drowning," Munerva Avdic told the Associated Press Television News. "And now that I'm talking to you, I feel blood freezing in my veins."